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Passion and Violence

Often called the “Dark Lady of American Letters,” Joyce Carol Oates is a controversial figure, simultaneously praised for her prolific versatility and taken to task for a fascination with violence that can seem prurient. In her fiction, violence is often at the root of passion, and passion almost inevitably leads to violence, a tautology and trap that we see again in “Little Bird of Heaven,” Oates’s 57th novel since 1964.

Set in Sparta, a fictional town in upstate New York, the novel explores the unsolved murder of Zoe Kruller, a bluegrass singer with a reputation for sleeping around. After she was strangled in bed, the police repeatedly detained and interrogated her estranged husband, Delray Kruller, and her married lover, Eddy Diehl. The two men were named “prime suspects” in the local paper, but neither was brought to trial. Still, the accusations marked them. The town remains split on which one must have done it. Her cuckolded husband has a clear motive (and he’s targeted for being part Seneca Indian). But their son, Aaron, insists that he was with his father during the murder. Her lover, Eddy, was not home that night, a fact that his scorned wife discloses to the cops after they search her home. She also issues a restraining order against him, forbidding contact with his children. The novel is split too, between Eddy’s daughter, Krista, and Delray and Zoe’s son, Aaron, as both try to make sense of what happened in the years surrounding the murder, and to establish their fathers’ innocence.

“That yearning in my heart!” Krista begins. Although she’s a grown woman, she still pines for her father with the rawness of an abandoned child. She was not even a teenager when Zoe died, and she lost her “Daddy,” as she continuously refers to him. Krista’s narrative, dominating the first half of the book, is riddled with exclamation points, italics and single-sentence paragraphs. The intensity grows wearisome at times, her passion verging on hysteria. But as she becomes an increasingly unreliable character witness, the story grows richer and more layered.

Krista’s memories are murky and jumbled, tinted by adoration and cast in the shadow of grief. They include regular trips to the dairy where Zoe worked, scooping ice cream and flirting shamelessly with Eddy. And then there was the time Krista came home early from school to find her father and his mistress alone, in a postcoital moment that the reader recognizes instantly, even if the child can’t. Krista is too much in love with her father to see him clearly, too easily persuaded by his aggressive charisma, enamored of his forceful charm. When he breaks the court order, showing up at her high school basketball practice, then stealing her away in his car, she is thrilled by the sight of him and also by the danger: “There is no happiness like . . . your handsome (forbidden) father so clearly exulting in your presence as in his possession of you as a thief might gloat over having made away with the most precious of valuables.”

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Illustration by Yarek Waszul

Krista is naïve, self-conscious and lonely. She has few friends, and her mother serves as a model for everything she doesn’t want to become: unfulfilled, bitter and sexless, pathetic in her Kmart stretch slacks. Krista is eerily reminiscent of the girl in the classic Oates story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” — so desperate for love and attention that she doesn’t recognize her suitor as a psychopath until it’s too late. If the parallel holds up, then it stands to reason that Eddy ­Diehl must be guilty. Or so the reader starts to suspect when he kidnaps Krista. Swept up in the romance of her dangerous daddy, by the time he shows her his loaded gun, she knows that she has crossed a line, but not how to get back to the other side.

The book opens in Krista’s point of view, then dips into other perspectives and jumps time periods, following not the carefully plotted chain of cause and effect but the associative logic of a nightmare. In Part 2, Aaron Kruller’s story takes over, in third person. Aaron is a heartbreaking character. When his mother left his father — hoping to make it as a singer — she left him too, as lonely and love-starved as Krista. He’s big and gruff and dark (much is made of how Indian he looks), held back in school and treated with suspicion like his father. But people pity him, too. He had the bad luck to find his mother’s strangled corpse, her skull pummeled. Desperate to cover up the violence, to purify her and make her “smell nice,” he sprinkled her with talcum powder, compromising the crime scene.

“Little Bird of Heaven” starts with the urgency of a thriller, then turns into something more existential as the years (and pages) go by with no developments in the case. This is a tragedy on a classical scale. Oates more than winks at the Greeks by naming the town Sparta, the murdered woman Zoe (which means “life”). Like the original Spartans, these people are stuck in a world where physicality dominates and runs violent. In tragedy, children are doomed to repeat their parents’ mistakes. So it’s unsurprising when as teenagers Krista and Aaron start to play a dangerous game. In one of the book’s most disturbing scenes, right after rescuing a drugged Krista from a boy who wanted to rape her by the train tracks, Aaron sexually assaults her. In the heat of the act, he ponders the “thrill of disgust” and imagines his penis as a murder weapon. Later, Krista confuses this event with the height of passion. In Sparta, passion and violence are inextricably and traumatically linked. Oates does not glorify this; rather, she traces the roots of the pathology to show how desire can degenerate.

When Zoe’s killer is finally revealed, the truth is anticlimactic. As a turning point in a mystery, it falls flat. But for Aaron and Krista, who have been waiting so long to know whether their fathers were murderers, it matters deeply. In the final chapters, we meet a different Krista. She is now a paralegal working on behalf of incarcerated men, trying to establish their innocence. Like her father, her clients are predators by reputation, strong and tough but poor and inarticulate. In some ways, what happened to Krista’s dad still defines her. But she has also left town, made something of the tragedy. Her voice has matured as well, grown more controlled, less naïve. When she reunites with Aaron, while their physical pull is as intense as ever, she recognizes “something impersonal, anonymous” and predatory in the way he touches her, and knows she should get out while she can.

Oates has been chided for a tendency toward melodrama, and the emotions in “Little Bird of Heaven” are definitely intense. Krista often sounds florid. But melodrama is a valid tool, one the Greeks used as well to dramatize the height of passion. In real melodrama, there’s a stark line between villains and innocents. In this novel, it’s not that straightforward. Oates has written a feminist novel with empathy for men, especially men without power, with no voice besides violence. In the end, Aaron, the murdered woman’s son, is still stuck in Sparta, a victim cast in the part of the thug. He is living proof that the stories we tell about people, the labels we slap them with, can define them to such an extent that they begin to forget the nuances of who they are, were and might have become. That’s the real tragedy.

LITTLE BIRD OF HEAVEN

By Joyce Carol Oates

442 pp. Ecco/HarperCollins Publishers.$25.99

Malena Watrous’s first novel, “If You Follow Me,” will be published next year.

A version of this review appears in print on , on Page BR10 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Passion and Violence. Today's Paper|Subscribe